Create parcel styles - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

- [Voiceover] So far you've seen how styles can be used to control the content, appearance, and behavior of objects and labels, but to this point the styles have all been there for you. What if you need to make your own styles? In this chapter you'll learn how to build a few styles of your own, starting in this video with parcel styles. So let's say this is your very first drawing with Civil 3D and you're working in a company where parcel drawings have been done in the past, but they've been done with AutoCAD, so everything's lines, arcs, circles, and polylines. And you wanna set up some Civil 3D styles to match the graphical standards that you need to follow in your company. So things like layers, colors, and line types. Let's also say that your company is very diligent about doing everything by layer. Now that's an AutoCAD topic, but it's a way of approaching your graphical standards and saying that as long as I choose the right layer for an object everything else is gonna fall into place. It's color, it's line type, and maybe even a few other things. So we're gonna make that assumption that in this company it's all about layer and that we don't need to independently control line type and color and other things. So in this drawing I've included some sample parcels. Now these are just polylines and they're on certain layers, or some of them have hatch patterns that are also on certain layers, and we wanna try to duplicate or build these graphical standards into the styles that we define in Civil 3D. So let's start with single family. Our single family lot has an outline and no hatch pattern fill, and that outline is on the layer C prop line. Pretty simple. So I'll go to the settings tab of the tool space, expand out parcel and parcel styles, and then I'll right-click parcel styles and pick new. That brings up the new parcel style dialog. I'll start on the information tab and give my style a name, I'll call it single family. You can add a description, they're optional, but always a good idea to provide some additional information about what is this style, what's it used for, that sort of thing. On the design tab it kind of has to do with patterning and the name template. We're not gonna worry about any of this for that, for this style, but we will in one of the future styles. Section, we're not really worried about section display right now, but this is kind of the important tab for every style that you configure, you're gonna have to go to this tab and make some selections. So on this display tab is where it breaks down the object into its different components. What can you display and how you control the properties of how those things are displayed? Parcel objects are pretty simple. There are only two components. The segments and the area fill. Remember for this particular style we don't need an area fill, so we can turn that off. And you can see it's already turned off. But we do need to define the layer. And as you may recall, that is C prop line. So I'll choose that layer, click OK, and then remember we said everything in this company is controlled by layer, so I need to make sure that my color, line type, everything that I can possibly set is set to by layer. You'll notice that plot style is set to by block, but it's greyed out. That's because this drawing is configured to plot by color and not by style. If I were working in a style-based drawing then this would be available and I would set it to by layer also. If this style had hatching in it I would continue on and configure the hatching, but I don't need to in this case. I can simply click OK. So now I've got a brand new style called single family. And I can apply that style to any parcel in the drawing by simply going to parcel properties, and choosing that style. And as we look at the parcel we can see it's a pretty good match to the sample. Looks like it's the same layer, line type, and so on as the example in the drawing. So that worked out quite well. Let's do a right of way parcel next. So that's this example. We can see that the outline is on the layer C R way and the hatch pattern is on the layer C road R way, you can't see it here, but it says P-A-T-T for pattern or hatch, another word for hatch. So C road R way patt, and the properties of that hatch are such that it's the dots pattern, it has an angle of zero, and a scale of 50. So those are some key values we need to remember. Alright, so rather than starting from scratch I'm gonna right-click single family and hit copy. And then I'll change the name. Call it R-O-W for right of way. And this time we've got some hatching to think about, so notice this parcel pattern fill section, observe fill distance. What this means is instead of hatching the entire interior of a parcel, let's go in a certain amount from the edge and stop there. Currently that's set to five feet. So instead of hatching the whole area in it's gonna do a five foot strip around the edge. That's not what we want, we wanna fill in the whole object. So I'm going to uncheck that box. Then I'll skip over to the display tab and we'll set our layers up. So remember they were C R-W-A-Y for right of way, and then we're gonna turn on the parcel area fill, and go to C road R way patt, C road, there it is right there. Then we also need to configure the hatch pattern itself. So I'll go down here to pattern, and as you may recall it was set to dots. I'll pick predefined here and browse. And that brings up a dialog where I can browse the different choices by their thumbnail images. And there I see dots, I'll select that, click OK. And then remember, the angle was zero and the scale was 50, so I'll set those as well. Click OK. My style is all set up. We can see it here. And now it's just a matter of applying that style to the drawing. So I can right-click and go to parcel properties, set the style to R-O-W. Check it in comparison to our example and it looks very good. It looks like we've got everything right. So by setting up the style and then applying that style to the parcel we're in turn applying the graphical standards for our company to that parcel. So as you can see parcel styles can be created and configured to match the standards that you need to adhere to.